NOTE FROM FOUNDER

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

— Pablo Picasso

As a child of trauma, multi-media Artist, Visual Analyst, Writer, Researcher, and cancer survivor, I’ve been long fascinated by the field of Art Therapy, in its potential to access emotions and facilitate expression. However, as an artist driven by my search of singular understanding and interpretation of the world, I am not drawn to looking through the specific diagnostic lens of Psychology.

Since my training at UCLA’s groundbreaking Social Emotional Arts Program (SEA) in 2017, and Partners in Care / Visiting Nurses as a Home Health Aide in 2018, I’ve been in pursuit of creating and developing a unique, self-defining, creative approach to healing and well-being: a novel language, an integrated, transformational and, ultimately, replicable process rooted in the fields of Art, Health, Healing, Wellness, Research and Neuroscience.

I was fortunate to be able to be my elderly father’s caretaker for 4 years. I tended to every aspect of his health and well-being: helping him stand up from his bed, assisting with his physical therapy, designing meal plans that would excite and energize him, monitoring his medications, tending to his post-surgery needs, organizing his financial affairs and health care when I was not there.</div>

I embarked on this Art-meets-wellness journey in 2014, after my singing by my Father’s bedside in the ICU normalized his oxygen levels, which had been dangerously low for 2 days following an emergency Craniotomy. My father died in 2017 at the wise age of 87, and soon after I decided to pursue a formalized plan, combining my experience and love of the Arts with my expertise in Research and passion for Caregiving.

My long-term goal and aspiration is to bridge the healing potential and practices of the Arts with the fields of Health, Wellness, and Neuroscience, and forge a new synthesis, a new hybrid, vital, profession: Art Practitioner.

— Vanessa Daou